Crowdsourcing gets a look

FAIRFAX, Va. (AP) ó Maybe youíve got a hunch Kim Jong Ilís regime in North Korea has seen its final days, or that the Ebola virus will re-emerge in the next year.

Your educated guess might be just as good as an expertís opinion. Statistics have long shown that large crowds of average people frequently make better predictions about unknown events, when their disparate guesses are averaged out, than any individual scholar ó a phenomenon known as the wisdom of crowds.

Now the nationís intelligence community, with the help of university researchers and regular folks, is studying ways to harness and improve the wisdom of crowds. The research could one day arm policymakers with information gathered by some of the same methods that power Wikipedia and social media.

In a project that is part competition and part research study, George Mason professors Charles Twardy and Kathryn Laskey are assembling a team on the Internet of more than 500 forecasters who make educated guesses about a series of world events.

They are competing with four other teams led by Professors at several universities.

Each differs in its approach, but all are studying how crowdsourcing can be used.

At stake is grant money provided by the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity, part of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, which heads up the nationís intelligence community.

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